[Dave Haynie]

I have a bunch of opinions.. big surprise.

These days, the hardware is identical. Apple does a fine job making it, but they charge more. They make about 5x as much profit per PC as the average PC reseller (HP, Dell, etc). I do a better job building a PC just for me, but most people won’t — I used to design personal computers for a living. The average PC sold is way cheaper and lower quality, in various ways, than the Macs. But they’re updated far more often, and most of Apple’s offerings are based on laptop hardware, which is more costly, lower power, but also lower performance.

In the workstation market, Apple used to be a very good thing.. a big company, with big company volumes, playing in a relatively small market. Not so much lately, though, because Apple frankly hasn’t been promoting professional use. The current Mac Pro got a spec update last spring, but it was just slightly faster CPUs in the two+ year old motherboard. They’re still shipping with a consumer-grade AMD 5000-series GPU as your only GPU choice. There’s some hope (fueled by a few vague comments) that Cook may reverse this plan, but I’d wait until that hardware actually materializes.

As for John’s comment about MacOS’s UNIX legacy — sure, it’s good. They’re actually using CMU’s Mach kernel, and as a CMU alumni, I can’t say much against that — it’s actually a better UNIX. On the other hand, Windows as it exists today uses Dave Cutler’s NT kernel, which is just as advanced, if not moreso, than Apple’s stuff (Cutler was a key guy at DEC on VAX/VMS). They’re actually both fairly modern microkernels, with capabilities not yet in mainsteam UNIX or Linux.

But that’s just the kernel. Apple is probably more stable over all, but they’re usualy way behind on new features. For example, video acceleration. Microsoft added the video acceleration API back in Vista… Apple put their’s in last year, and it still has issues. Apple’s remained very protective — MS seems almost like a free-for-all, since MS is concerned, always, about someone else solving the problem in Windows. Apple doesn’t care, since 3rd party standards win on MacOS without Apple’s blessing.

With all that said — and keep in mind, I’m a hardware guy — choose your applications first. Then pick a computer to run them on. The application is the thing you’re dealing with, daily. If you want Vegas, you’re picking a PC… could be an HP or Boxx workstation, or a very high end gaming machine, or something handed down by your uncle, depending on you budget. But if the application is one you’re good with, it’ll never be the wrong decision.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Incidently, DNxHD _is_ an actual standard. Like Apple, Avid created DNxHD as a high quality format for intermediate, post, or interchange. But unlike Apple, they didn’t keep it proprietary, they released it as a standard.. that’s SMPTE VC-3. Part of any real standards process documents the full thing in enough detail to allow independent implementations. Mainconcept has an independent implementation, for example.

Sadly, it’s true that Apple has pushed ProRes as a format for this same use — primarily to ensure that Apple’s PCs and software remain a standard anywhere ProRes is adpoted as the standard. Avid has done a far worse job of advocating DNxHD.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

You’ll need about 12GB free for a 60-63minute HDV tape, 16GB free for an 80-82minute tape.

You don’t need to install Vegas… you can capture HDV with any video capture tool.

The main problem with older PCs, particularly laptops, is the system-wide Firewire latency. A Firewire capture always happens precisely in realtime, regardless of CPU or HDD. That’s because the camera is essentially just playing out Firewire data just as if it were playing out analog video. Any PC from the last 20 years should be fast enough for HDV capture, but some have latency issues that cause frame drop-outs. Just something to watch out for.

I didn’t use the Vegas Capture tool for HDV, I always used “HDVSplit” instead: https://strony.aster.pl/paviko/hdvsplit.htm. This seems to be a bit more efficient than Sony’s capture tool. Worth a try, anyway.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I rendered 10min of MP3 to a WAV output. I don’t have Vegas 9 installed anymore, or any 32-bit version. The 64-bit Vegas 10 rendered it in 15seconds. The 64-bit Vegas 11 rendered it in 3 seconds, about the same as Sound Forge 10.

Vegas 12 actually refused to import the MP3 files. Ouch!

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

That was probably me.

They have done occasional maintenance updates, like the recent one bundled with Vegas 12. But little has happened in a long time: DVD Architect 5.0 came out in 2008… the small 5.2 update came out in 2010. This clearly has not seen any active development in a long time.

Do I know that they’re NOT about to release a DVDA 6.0 with hundreds of new features? Of course not. However, having worked in hardware and software development since the 80s, I know what it looks like.

What could they add? How about missing DVD features? How about multiple title sets? Even some little details; some of the more advanced tricks you can do with DVD, like using transparency in various ways, either isn’t supported on DVD, or works there but isn’t faithfully reproduced on the Blu-ray model (what you use to author in DVDA is basically an abstraction layer Sony builds over the “guts” of the DVD and BD standards.. some of the early programs didn’t do this, so while you didn’t have any of the nicer automatic features, you could do anything DVD was capable of doing, which is not true of DVDA).

How about actual Blu-ray features? DVDA has the whole “make a DVD or Blu-ray that look the same” thing pretty well nailed. How about Pop-ups, for example?

And the user interface is ancient… it’s actually a bit more primitive than some of the early tools I used, like Impression. More features, absolutely, but there’s no tree view of the whole project, no way to graphically add things in such a view or introduce an asset without dropping it somewhere first, etc. Play with Adobe Encore a little, you’ll see what you’re missing. Or BluPrint. Or DoStudio.

And those latter applications are also setting limits on what Sony’s ever going to do with DVDA. If they make DVDA too good, how are they going to sell DoStudio? This is exactly the kind of problem that allows suites like Sony’s or Adobe’s to advance much faster than, say, Avid’s, since Avid had to put artificial limits on their lower-end tools to protect the high end saleability, while the companies without a higher program didn’t.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Hsu Chaw-Bin] “If you’re saying where the audio samples came from, yes it’s not, it’s from my external hard drive.”

Tell me more about the external drive. USB, eSATA, Firewire, SCSI, Thunderbolt…. what’s the interface?

In theory, you’re ok on USB 2.0 or faster, as long as the drive is reasonably good. Some very low power portable drives will have latency issues, not throughput issues, with a large number of tracks.

The long hang you see could be hardware related. Is it Vegas hanging, or the whole PC? Initiating a process that takes lots of interrupts and/or high priority processes (eg, like buffering up a huge volume of audio through a relatively slow USB connection — it’s not just the speed of USB, but the fact it needs lots of CPU hand-holding during the transfers).

Just for grins, do you have enough space on the C: drive or another internal drive to see if the same problems occur there?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, definitely NOT a general problem with Vegas 12. I just played the mixing projects in Vegas 12 from a session I did last spring (https://www.frogpondmedia.com/funkinsoulnuts).

FYI, all tracks recorded at 96kHz, 24-bit. Highest track count is 22 (“Chain of Fools”), at least one EQ and often many other FX on each track. So maybe I’m not stressing the system as much as Hsu Chaw-Bin is… not sure of his sample size.

This is on my D: drive, which is a 3TB Maxtor “Green” drive, which I think means variable speed these days. Recorded on a multi-track Tascam US1800 using ASIO drivers, but played back just now on a Behringer DF0202 USB device, with standard Windows drivers. All settings in Vegas 12 untounched, which is either defaults or imported from Vegas 11… not sure what the installed had in mind on this.

Anyway, not a glitch to be heard. I suppose standard out-of-band stuff applies, too:

– Did you reset your PC?
– Do you have the lastest drivers for your audio device?
– Did you defrag your source drive?
– This is not drive C:, is it?
– Not using that source drive for anything else at the same time, eh?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Could be the sound output device… but that still doesn’t explain any difference between Vegas 11 and Vegas 12. Also, for a mixdown, the stress isn’t really all that much on the card itself. Vegas is fetching all 20 or 30 or whatever tracks from HDD, applying FX, mixing to Stereo, etc… all in INTERNAL buffers, before the sound card is even involved. If he’s doing output to a multichannel device, of course, that’s very different.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Steve Rhoden] ” The errors of Vegas 11 will port
over to Vegas 12 it seems.”

That should not be true. At least since Vegas Pro Audio, installs have been completely independent of one another.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

According to the Sony site,SVP12 – DVDA5.2 = SVE12. Simpy put, Vegas Pro 12, no DVD Architect.

Not too shabby, really. Plenty of editing tasks do not require disc-based delivery. And for those making discs, given that Sony seems to have stopped development on DVD Architect anyway, someone new to Vegas might better spend those two bills on a program still being worked on.

-Dave